Fall 2026-Winter 2027
Fall 2026
ENGL 5004F: Studies in Transnational Literatures (cross-listed with ARTH 5112F/CLMD 6102F/MGDS 5002E)
Prof. Sarah Casteel
Topic: Black Europe
This seminar explores “Black Europe” as a historical phenomenon, a theoretical framework, and a set of artistic practices. We will engage with a series of creative and critical texts that foreground Europe’s historical and contemporary entanglements with Africa and its diasporas. Together, we will read, look at, and listen to works by Black European intellectuals, activists, writers, artists, performers, and musicians. Challenging an understanding of Europe as a bounded, racially homogenous space, these works reframe European history and culture through Black perspectives.
The interdisciplinary, or “undisciplined,” design of this course is critical to its excavation of Black European cultural histories that have been occluded by more conventional frameworks. Reading across different media will help to expose the “bundles of silences” (Trouillot) surrounding the contributions of Black artists—especially Black women artists—to European literature, art, and music.
ENGL 5005F: M.A. Seminar
Prof. Sarah Brouillette
TBC
ENGL 5303F: Studies in Early Modern Literature I (cross-listed with ENGL 4301A/HUMS 4902A)
Prof. Micheline White
TBC
ENGL 5402F: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature (cross-listed with ENGL 4115B)
TBC
ENGL 5610F: Studies in Contemporary Literature I
Prof. Brian Greenspan
Topic: Digital Dystopia
A survey of utopian and dystopian thinking around media and technology.
The enormous popularity of dystopian narratives in recent years is hardly surprising, given the daily barrage of stories about war, climate change, pandemics, mass surveillance, and AI. What is surprising is that even the most disturbing stories of real or imaginary technological apocalypse continue to inspire utopian hope, and to shape our identities in ways that are progressive and collective. Does literature still offer a viable enclave within the broader networks of new media? How can fiction help us to imagine a better world in a “post-truth” era that coopts the strategies of fictionality itself?
This seminar will explore the role of new media and technologies in contemporary fiction. We will read utopian and dystopian narratives alongside studies of science fiction, technology, and intentional communities. We will also explore new digital tools for analyzing texts, visualizing data, authoring stories, and/or building simulations in order to better evaluate the hopeful or apocalyptic discourses surrounding new media.
ENGL 5804F: Studies in Canadian Literature I (cross-listed with CDNS 5201A/WGST 5902A)
Prof. Jennifer Henderson
Topic: Rereading ‘Women’s Liberation’
This course undertakes a critical examination of the ‘Women’s Liberation’ movement of the 1970s. We look at archival materials and media representations from the period, as well as recent scholarship on the complex legacies of the movement and ambivalent relations to it. Our readings include movement writing and periodicals, autobiography, art installation, film, manifesto and ephemera as we work with several Canadian archives. Our interests are in the movement’s rhetorics, figures, and emotions; its practices of consciousness raising, formation of collectives and direct action; its wild imagination and something like its ‘atmosphere.’ We pay attention to the uncertain and contested meanings of ‘woman’ and ‘women’; the construction of ‘lesbian feminist’ as a social identity; the attempt to produce an analysis of gendered labour under capitalism through the concept of social reproduction. Throughout, we’ll be thinking about the movement’s staging both within and against colonialism, racism, heteronormativity, and binary gender. The course aims to be an inclusive, 2SLGBTQ-positive space and is for anyone interested in learning how to think about identities and politics historically. Women’s Liberation took shape in a world very different to ours–before the structural and ideological changes of neoliberalism in the later decades of the 20th century, which is part of what we’ll work to understand as we look at a movement in its moment of messy eruption and relate to its memory as a complex inheritance.
ENGL 5900F: Selected Topics in English Studies I (cross-listed with ENGL 4607A/WGST 4812C/WGST 5901C)
Prof. Jodie Medd
Topic: Queer/ Feminist/ Life/ Writing
This course takes queer/feminist/life/writing as a suggestive constellation for exploring a range of hybrid texts that include elements of biofiction/biostory, autobiography, memoir, creative nonfiction, the personal essay, critical fabulation, autotheory, and more. We will study twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts—many by writers working across literary and academic forms—to consider how authors have engaged with, innovated, and disrupted forms and genres for narrating feminist and queer lives; how they have blended personal writing with political, theoretical, philosophical and academic discourse; how their texts mattered to the moment of their composition; and how and why they matter now. The writers on our course are attuned to how individual, embodied experience is formed—and de-formed—by structures of power and narrative modes. Their work engages these connections through formal innovations to make us perceive, think, and read differently. Students will have leeway to research, write, and present on areas of interest to them, from literary form and style to theoretical frameworks and socio-cultural-political issues. Students will have the option to develop a final creative/critical project of personal interest to them, inspired by the hybrid life/writing from the course.
Content may include (but is not limited to) childhood; parenthood; loss and grief; Black life and the afterlife of slavery; racial capitalism; trans narratives; queer Indigeneity and the Canadian colonial project; illness narratives; disability justice; subjectivity, representation and the writing “I;” community and care; lifewriting and the archives; the literary institution and the work of empire; intimate partner abuse; trauma and recovery; art, academia and activism; genrification . . . and more.
Expect authors/creators on the course to include: Billy-Ray Belcourt, Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, Audre Lorde, Carmen Maria Machado, Maggie Nelson, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Paul B Preciado, Christina Sharpe, Joshua Whitehead, and Virginia Woolf.
ENGL 6005F: Theory & Practice of Literary Studies
Prof. Julie Murray
Topic: Bookish
The expressions “nose in a book” or “lost in a book” elicit an association of “bookish” people with solitary and private reading, sometimes bordering on the anti-social. But a different sense of bookish means almost the opposite: today, on social media (Booktok and Bookstagram for instance), to be bookish is to be extremely online, possibly parasocial, and definitely invested in the ostentatious curation and display of books. This course will explore the history (18th C to the present day) of these two seemingly opposed senses of bookish – the first focusing on the inside of books, and the second on the outside. Topics will include: the materiality of books; the history of the codex book; bibliomania through the ages; select moments in the history of reading, including close reading and algorithmic reading; books and social media; books in the age of digital publishing; and much more.
Winter 2027
ENGL 5002W: Studies in Theory I
Prof. Paul Keen
TBC
ENGL 5006W: Studies in Theory II
Prof. Travis DeCook
Topic: Theories of Authorship, from Plato to AI
“What is an author?” is a perennial question, currently at the heart of debates over intellectual property, the nature of cultural production, and so-called “artificial intelligence.” This seminar will explore theories of authorship articulated by Plato, Sidney, Shelley, Freud, Nietzsche, Eliot, Borges, Barthes, Foucault, and others. We will examine topics such as inspiration and its secularization; the relationship between the “death of the author” and politics; the ethics of authorship; the origins of intellectual property; notions of social authorship; the relationship between the material book and concepts of authorship; the implications of new media; contemporary “post-copyright” cultural formations; and the implications of artificial intelligence for how we understand the nature of authorship.
ENGL 5606W: Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
Prof. Dana Dragunoiu
Topic: Nabokov and the Social
Nabokov’s image as a life-long champion of liberal freedoms is not false. Having been raised in late-imperial Russia, doomed to a life of exile by Soviet dictatorship, and chased out of Europe by the rise of Nazi totalitarianism, he produced a body of work that consistently defended the individual against the collective. Since he arrived in the United States, however, his career unfolded against a backdrop of constitutionally protected freedoms and weak collectives. The seminar will focus on the second half of his career during which his defence of liberal freedoms is accompanied by a new concern for the life of the collective. We will read closely the four novels on which his English-language reputation rests: Lolita, Pnin, Pale Fire, and Ada. We will read these in parallel with selections from leading figures from social and economic anthropology, such as Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Godelier, Christopher Gregory, Janet Carsten, Françoise Héritier, and Marshall Sahlins. The aim of the seminar is to trace the extent to which Nabokov’s post-war fiction becomes preoccupied with ideals that convene under the rubric of the social, such as community, loyalty, and solidarity.
ENGL 5606X: Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
TBC
ENGL 5900W: Selected Topic in English Studies I
Prof. Barbara Leckie
TBC
ENGL 5900X: Selected Topic in English Studies I (cross-listed with CDNS 5301B/CLDM 6103W)
Prof. P. Hodgins
TBC
ENGL 5901W: Selected Topic in English Studies II (FILM 4201B/ENGL 5002W)
Prof. Philip Kaisary
Topic: Capitalism and Critique in Film and Fiction
Debates over contemporary capitalism abound: in mass-market books, on television and radio, in the pages of such publications as The Financial Times and The Economist, in the reports of global management consultancies, and throughout social media and the blogosphere, discussion of contemporary capitalism’s stagnation, failures, manifold crises, and whether or not it can be fixed has become commonplace. As part of this broad debate, cultural forms – including, but not limited to, film, fiction, painting, and photography – have for long constituted a valuable resource for better understanding and articulating critiques of capitalism. An awareness of this deep history undergirds this course in which we will watch and discuss a corpus of fiction films, art films, and documentary films, produced between the 1990s and the present, that address the inequality, unevenness, and sacrifices that are part and parcel of world-wide or global capitalism. Key concepts and categories that will inform our endeavour will include the idea of ‘savage’ capitalism, techno-capitalism, petro-capitalism, capitalism and class stratified society, and capitalism and the contemporary global migrant crisis. In small groups, we will also read a sample of recent speculative fiction addressed to the concept of “techno-capitalism.” These readings will deepen our understanding and develop our project of critique. Reflecting capitalism’s global reach, our corpus of primary materials are drawn from locations including Argentina, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Korea, Mexico, South Africa, and the United States. To enrich our viewing of the films and our reading of the fiction, we will draw on various works of critical social and political theory.